The Risk Pool

my surprise, said I had better go back in and say goodbye.
    “Let’s just go,” I said. I didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to hear whatever it was that she would say to me, didn’t want any explanations. Maybe, in a week or so, after I’d digested it. But not now. Not with my clothes piled in cardboard boxes in the backseat of my father’s car. Not in front of all the whole houses on our tree-lined block. I imagined the neighbors watching from behind darkened windows.
    My father shrugged. “Do what you want,” he said. “If it was me, I’d go say something.”
    I just sat until he cuffed me on the side of the head, his signal that I should look at him. I didn’t want to. He cuffed me again though, so I did. “You want to take your bike?”
    It was leaning against the back porch beneath the maple tree.
    I went to get it while he opened the trunk and rearranged the clutter. I could have put it in myself, but he took it from me and nodded toward the house. Telling myself it was to avoid the back of his hand, I went.
    Her door was still shut, and there was no response when I knocked. “Mom?” I said to the door. “We’re going.”
    There was a moment’s silence, a gathering up, then a formal voice. “All right, dear,” she said, as if she hadn’t spent the last twelve years trying to prevent this very event. And so I just stood there, the door between us, studying the tiny bubbles in the varnish, as if their design would tell me what to do. Finally, I pushed the door open a crack.
    She lay in the fetal position, her back to me. The squeak of the hinge had no visible effect, but when I put my hand on hershoulder, she began to shake, so I took it away. She tried to tell me something then, but she got stuck on the first-person pronoun, repeating it again and again. Everything but sorrow drained out of me as I listened to her. My knees became liquid. “It’ll be all right,” I told her.
    And then I left.
    Pulling away from the curb, my father said, “How the hell did she
get
like that?”
    I said I didn’t know.
    “Stuff like that doesn’t just happen,” he said, almost accusatorily. There was something like fear in his voice, too, as if he suspected that whatever was wrong with her might be viral, contagious. He looked at me as if I might be a carrier. “Well?” he said.
    That night, he waited until he figured I was asleep, then left. I heard his footsteps echoing down the stairs. I got out of bed and went over to the window in time to see him emerge directly below and drive off in the Mercury. It was after midnight by then, but sleep seemed a long way off and I wished I’d had the foresight to bring a book to read. Spindrift Island suddenly seemed an improbable place though, and I doubted its power to comfort now.
    In the living room my father had left the television on, but the station had gone off the air. I flipped around the dial, but managed only to locate the last few bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then more snow. I was about to turn off the set when I noticed a small framed picture hiding behind the dusty rabbit ears. I held the photograph to the snowy screen for light and found myself studying a grinning, six-year-old me, all ears and teeth.
    It was an odd discovery. All you had to do was look around the room to see that my father didn’t have much. I wondered how he came to have me. It wasn’t a picture I recognized. Who had taken it? Had my mother sent it to him? Had Aunt Rose? And how had it found its way into a frame and onto his TV? I fell asleep soon after without having figured any of it out.

11
    When you lived on the top floor of the tallest building in Mohawk, you didn’t really need curtains, or at least that’s what my father’s thinking must have been, because when the sun cleared the summit of Myrtle Park, it streamed right in our tall windows, warming the big apartment and making sleep next to impossible. I woke with the feeling that I had recently been cold, and vaguely aware that there was something strange about my surroundings, but not strange enough to be alarming. I dozed for awhile, until I remembered where I was and sat up.
    The vast, nearly empty bedroom seemed even larger in the daylight. The bathroom was a very long way off across the cold, uncarpeted floor, and my slippers were safely at the foot of the bed in my mother’s house. I dashed, wishing I’d done more than pretend to pee the night before. When I was done, I stood on tiptoe